Names on maps
HelenAA
🖼️ 3 images Surveyor
The map I'm working on will be used in a short story. I'm placing a lot of towns, cities etc but if I name everything it will obstruct a lot of the geography.
I want to name only the places that will feature in the story. I presume that that is OK?
Comments
That's generally a good approach. The most important for people reading your story is to identify the places they read about on the map. Then you can expand on it later with more names if you write more stories set in that location.
Yes, I have seen maps in the first volume of a series with too many names. Then I try to find them in the text. Not there.
I've got different type of names for my map
Geographical Features, i.e inland sea, region, mountain range, islands
Place names i.e towns/cities
Location of cultural significance
Sites of old battles and ruins
(Possible) sites of new battles -- not sure about those
My question is can I get away with a mix of number labels and text labels? Towns and cities as numbers and text for the rest or do I have to pick one and stick with it?
Not really sure how well mixing text labels and number labels would work, but in the end, the only way to know is to try and see if you are happy with the result. There are no absolute rules you have to stick to.
If I were to do that though, based on the elements in your list above, I would probably use text labels for geographical features and town names, and then use numbers for "interesting locations" like battle sites, ruins, cultural location, etc.... This seperates "proper" map information from supplementary information.
I'm using different sizes of fonts at the moment to keep things separate in my head at present and I am just starting to think about names and one or two more of your "interesting locations". My problem would be to extend the map-width wise to put any number key. I'm not going to extend upwards - had enough hassles when I did that in a very early version of the map!
I've seen commercial maps where different size text was used. Large locations such as mountain ranges, important rivers, large lakes had a certain size text. Smaller ones of the same type had smaller text.
The signifcant land locations did have a black outline to the text but i took that off as i found it hard to read - OK, I could have merely shrunk the outline in that sheet effect but I'm not really a fan of black surround to letters; I would prefer the black text and a lighter surround if i really had to.